News

Brave new world expands solar system by 2 billion miles

THE SOLAR system is bigger than we thought. Scientists have found a new world orbiting the sun 2 billion miles beyond Pluto, which had been the most distant known planet.

Existence of the new object ?? provisionally named Sedna, after the Inuit goddess of the sea ?? will be announced by Nasa tomorrow. It is about 6 billion miles from Earth and the space shuttle would need to travel for more than 40 years to reach it.

Michael Brown, associate professor of planetary astronomy at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), whose team made the discovery, said the find was the most significant for years.

??Sedna is very big, and much further out than previous discoveries,?? he said. It extended significantly the known boundaries of the solar system.

Measurements suggest that Sedna has a diameter of more than 1,200 miles, making it the biggest find in the solar system since Pluto